François Duvalier, also known as Papa Doc, was a Haitian politician and voodooist who served as the president of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971. He was elected president in the 1957 general election on a populist and black nationalist platform. After thwarting a military coup d'état in 1958, his regime rapidly became more autocratic and despotic. An undercover government death squad, the Tonton Macoute, indiscriminately tortured or killed Duvalier's opponents; the Tonton Macoute was thought to be so pervasive that Haitians became highly fearful of expressing any form of dissent, even in private. Duvalier further sought to solidify his rule by incorporating elements of Haitian mythology into a personality cult.
Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed "Baby Doc", was a Haitian dictator who inherited the President of Haiti from 1971 until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in February 1986. He succeeded his father François "Papa Doc" Duvalier as the ruler of Haiti after his death in 1971. After assuming power, he introduced cosmetic changes to his father's regime and delegated much authority to his advisors. Thousands of Haitians were tortured and killed, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during his presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle while poverty among his people remained the most widespread of any country in the Western Hemisphere.
The Tonton Macoute or simply the Macoute, was a Haitian paramilitary and secret police force created in 1959 by dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Haitians named this force after the Haitian mythological bogeyman, Tonton Macoute, who kidnaps and punishes unruly children by snaring them in a gunny sack before carrying them off to be consumed for breakfast. The Macoute were known for their brutality, state terrorism, and assassinations. In 1970, the militia was renamed the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. Though formally disbanded in 1986, its members continued to terrorize the country.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Amy Gerstler is an American poet living in Los Angeles, California. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Linda K. Hogan is an American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She previously served as the Chickasaw Nation's writer in residence. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles author, novelist, and journalist, whose work examines the evolving and interdependent relationship between Latin America, Latino immigrants, and the United States. In 2023, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.
Eliza Griswold is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and poet. Griswold is currently a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. She is the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2019, and which was a 2018 New York Times Notable Book and a Times Critics' Pick. Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a former Nieman Fellow and a current Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. She has experimented with different styles of writing, including writing obituaries for parts of her life, including her parents and herself, in OBIT, letters in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and a Japanese form known as waka in The Trees Witness Everything. In all of her poems and books, Chang has several common themes: living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. She has also written three books for children.
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books.
Carmen Giménez, formerly known as Carmen Giménez Smith, is an American poet, writer, and editor.
Lorraine Adams is an American journalist and novelist. As a journalist, she is known as a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and a former contributor to The Washington Post. As a novelist, she is known for the award-winning Harbor and its follow-up, The Room and the Chair.
Brenda Wineapple is an American non-fiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.
Amanda Vaill is an American writer and editor, noted for her non-fiction. She lives in New York City.
Maggie Steber is an American documentary photographer. Her work has documented a wide range of issues, including the African slave trade, Native American issues in the United States, natural disasters, and science.
Paul Hendrickson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He is a senior lecturer and member of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former member of the writing staff at the Washington Post.
Lacy M. Johnson is an American writer, professor and activist. She is the author of Trespasses: A Memoir, The Other Side: A Memoir and The Reckonings: Essays.
